To School or Not To School?

hi,

i went to school when i was young (loooong ago) to learn... chinese

except for that, honestly, i’v had to help guys having their work experience in an agency at the end of well known coding/programming schools and the only thing i can say is it strongly looked like what Bob Ray describes... I do think the best school for web coding and programming is, as Susan suggests, the web itself !

just one thing about MS, i must say i’m a hundred percent of a php guy but, to go with losendae, MS C# object is soooooo smarter than php one, it kills me to admit it but yes it is...

have swing

I know people who work exclusively in C# and they love it.

I’ve a little different take on school.

Back in 2000, my local community college here in the rural West offered a 2yr web development course. Just a handful of students signed up and only 3 of us made it through the entire program. We had one teacher, a self-taught PHP expert. Remember, this is back in the days of Apache 1.3, PHP 4.2, HTML 3 and IE was the only game in town, before CSS was stable enough to use and Netscape got a toehold in the browser world. That all seems like centuries ago now, and newcomers to web development these days have no idea how limited were our tools then.

But back to school...that teacher was fantastic, building our basic skills and providing real-life practical advice about how to live and thrive as a web developer. It was the perfect launch for me, although I’m sorry to say that the college web program soon went by the wayside due to poor enrollment. Oh, the teacher? We’re still good friends...he’s still building PHP apps and we occasionally get together to converse on all the latest stuff from the perspective of two old geeks we’ve now become.

So I think it’s not whether formal courses are good or bad. It all boils down to a bright and dedicated teacher who’s been in the trenches and brings all that savvy advice to the classroom. Find one and school may not be a bad choice.

One thing that I often find true but obviously have not researched is a quote someone told me recently...

"Those who can: do, and those who can’t: teach."

I’m very much convinced that people with the skills are busy enough with that and in many cases are too busy to even consider going to a teachers’ hourly rate (possibly follow a bunch of obligatory courses to teach them how to deal with students) and teach students how they do it. The education I’m in has two lecturers (out of, what, 250?) that I believe truly know what they are talking about and are able to pass that message on to students. Obviously I’ve not had class from all 250, but those two are the only ones that really pop up during convos with peers on how bad teachers are (".. except this and this one!").


Now, I’m *very* biased and this may not even be related to the web industry. I currently follow an education aimed at becoming a manager in a hospitality operation But I’ve been doubting for the past half year and am probably going to stop doing that and just focus on my web dev business, and continue self-teaching like I learned how to do what I do. Perhaps do a course to get a formal education on paper in a year or two. But anyway - I’ve written a quite lengthy blog post about that subject that will be published on my new site due in about a month, so can’t tell everything yet


I guess when it comes to the web development industry - formal education is something like Internet Explorer 6.